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satt comments on Math prerequisites for understanding LW stuff - Less Wrong Discussion
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A disclaimer on Wolfram's A New Kind of Science: quite a few of the scientists who reviewed it weren't particularly enthusiastic. See for example Cosma Shalizi's review (of special interest to Less Wrong readers, perhaps, for the side comment on Jaynes towards the end! Edit: or maybe not; Shalizi's linked arXiv paper is probably wrong as p4wnc6 explains below). This webpage collects a lot of other reviews of the book as well.
It seems Shalizi's comments on Jaynes have been somewhat refuted. The paper claiming that subjective Bayes induces a backward arrow of time fails to account for the entropy generation inside the mind of the agent forming beliefs about the world. It requires energy to convert observations into states of belief, and hence increases entropy. Shalizi's argument does not account for this and (like many puffed-up "rebuttals" of Jaynes) fails for an essentially trivial reason. Shalizi is a great writer and thoughtful researcher, but just got things very very wrong on that occasion.